Let us summarise. You are trying to assess the readiness of your organisation to establish and operate high performance projects. You are doing this by issuing a Declaration for your project stakeholders to complete. They normally complete the Declaration anonymously in a workshop environment: one Declaration for each stakeholder. When the workshop is over, you will end up with a host of Declarations in your hands. You have an easy to use numerical classification to perform a summary analysis of the results and you do this for each of the Declarations. So now you have a fistful of Declarations and each one has a number. It really is fun this is not it? But why are we doing this and what do we do with this number?

What we are doing is harnessing the power of the group. We described this earlier when we explained the realistic though fragile link to complexity science. We have suitably enhanced the results by expanding the debate. So the readiness conclusions of your stakeholders are now much more accurate and the group debate has opened up the opportunity to examine the disagreement and evidence of this. Further examination of any disagreement over the readiness of the project environment and any evidence of this, is steadily minimised and/or removed. The combination of the results is therefore a more representative outcome rather than before the debate was enacted. So we develop this concept further and blend the results we identified and derived earlier. Now, calculate the average by adding up all of the number totals from each of the stakeholders Declarations then dividing the sum by the number of stakeholders.

This average is established to gain an honest appraisal of the whole group but removing the extreme influences of particular individuals who scored particularly high or particularly low. This has the effect of flattening the profile of the assessment results and offers an overall calculated result to represent the most accurate numerical estimation of the capability of a project environment to satisfactorily deliver high performance projects. It is not going to win the Nobel Prize for Science and thankfully is not seeking to bid for it either. What it is trying to do is give a tolerable and commonsense assessment of how prepared the organisation is. It then seeks to offer a percentage that a team or manager can adopt to compare against industry data as well as data on other projects in an organisation. It is fit for that purpose.